One is a limited use roll that gives you precious I-frames, but has a small cooldown to keep you from spamming. In another example, you’re given two meaningful ways of avoiding damage. A certain percentage of the damage a twin takes won’t immediately drain from the health bar, and if you tag them out before they take any more hits, they’ll slowly recover that health while their sibling fights instead. In single player, you can only play as one twin at a time, while there’s an interesting ‘tag’ system to encourage you to use both. There’s quite a bit of technical depth to combat, as well. Victories thus feel properly earned once you’ve achieved them, making Young Souls a consistently rewarding experience.
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You’re constantly being pushed to learn enemy tells, wait for proper windows to get in a few shots, and make full usage of all the techniques and attacks at your disposal. We’d encourage you to go with the intended difficulty, however, as the hard-hitting enemies and patterns feel like they’re at that perfect mark where they’re manageable, but not on the first try. Those of you that are put off by high difficulty games like this will be pleased to know that there are a few difficulty levels here so you can scale the game to meet your skill level. Young Souls is still plenty difficult, but it never feels like you’ve hit an insurmountable wall-there’s always something else you could be doing to still make progress. If the boss at the end of one stage is just giving you way too much grief, you can always try another level instead and come back later once you’ve gotten better gear. What’s nice about this non-linear system is that it gives you some agency to make progress on your own terms. Each stage has a suggested level requirement displayed before you enter, giving you a hint of the ideal stats you’ll need to deal with the enemies contained within. Some doors are mandatory, others are optional, and others are locked using keys that you’ll only acquire later on.
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Once you clear a room, you then typically move to another arena just to the right, but the level design proves to be more varied than just a linear A-to-B sequence.Įach region of the goblin world is broken up into a series of levels scattered around a small hub level. Most of your time will be spent in small arenas where you cut through a few waves of foes by all manner of punches, kicks, grabs, and throws. Gameplay follows the flow of a typical beat ‘em up, but with several additional elements thrown in to make for an overall more rounded experience. After pairing up with a friendly goblin, the two thus set out on a long guest to dismantle the key players of the war effort and hopefully save their professor in the process. They follow it through and find themselves in a lost world far beneath the surface of the earth, populated by a warring race of goblins that are mounting a plan to take over the surface. After a quick trip into town, the kids return home to find the place ransacked and their beloved professor gone, while an ominous portal stands open in his lab. The professor is an expert in Cryptozoology, and though he clearly cares about the kids in his care, he spends most of his time toiling away in the lab on some mysterious project. Young Souls follows the story of Tristan and Jenn, a set of orphaned headstrong twins living with an eccentric professor on the edge of town. Young Souls proves itself to be a remarkably quality release that builds well on the foundations of the genre with some well-implemented ideas, making for an experience you won’t want to miss. Unsurprisingly, the studio soon set about porting the release to other platforms, and it’s finally arrived now on the Switch. Then in 2021, the game launched as a Stadia exclusive and… well, we all know how that went. Nearly four years ago, The Arcade Crew and 1P2P revealed Young Souls, a promising new entry in the oft-overlooked beat ‘em up genre.